Top 100 Fairy Stories Quotes
#1. I was born an only child in Vienna, Austria. My father found hours to sit by me by the library fire and tell fairy stories.
Hedy Lamarr
#2. A child ... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change into a most helpful friend is ready to believe that a strange child whom he meets and fears may also be changed from a menace into a desirable companion.
Bruno Bettelheim
#3. This world needs Utopias as it needs fairy stories. It does not matter so much where we are going, as long as we are making consciously for some definite goal. And a Utopia, however strange or fanciful, is the only possible beacon upon the uncharted seas of the distant future.
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
#4. As a child, my mother told me lots of fairy stories, many her own invention. She, too, tended to reverse the norm.
Tanith Lee
#5. One of the things that turns me on the most is imagining new worlds, just as I did as a kid, when I listened to fairy stories and imagined what they looked like and what those worlds were like.
Nick Willing
#6. There are fairy stories to be written for adults. Stories that are still in a green state.
Andre Breton
#7. Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it's revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as the giant book of Jewish fairy stories
Iain Banks
#8. Beautiful girls in fairy stories are as common as pebbles on the beach. Magnolia-skinned milkmaids rub shoulders with starry-eyed princesses and, in fact, counting two eyes in each bright-eyed damsel would result in a whole galaxy of twinkling stars.
Eloisa James
#9. Small wonder that spell means both a story told, and a formula of power over living men. -On Fairy Stories
J.R.R. Tolkien
#10. When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books in the world - why should I write another one?'
Nicolas Roeg
#11. For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and law?
Peter Watson
#12. The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.
G.K. Chesterton
#13. Only thin, weak thinkers despise fairy stories. Each one has a true, strange fact hidden in it, you know, which you can find if you look.
Diana Wynne Jones
#14. Away with them, away; we should not believe fairy stories if we wish to be good. Think of them as persons from the fairy wood.
Stevie Smith
#15. In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a German chieftain had become a Roman Emperor. Now in the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognised as King of England. Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?
Hendrik Willem Van Loon
#16. Names are still magic; even Sharon, Karen, Darren, and Warren are magic to somebody somewhere. In fairy stories, naming is knowledge. When I know your name, I can call your name, and when I call your name, you'll come to me.
Jeanette Winterson
#17. Nothing was easy, and sometimes she failed, and sometimes she thought that the fairy stories were right, that there must indeed be easier ways of living happily ever after; but defeat is a poor ending to any tale, so she kept trying.
Sonya Hartnett
#18. As a shy kid growing up in Sheffield, I fantasized about how it would be great to be famous so I wouldn't actually have to talk to people and feel awkward. And of course, as we all know from fairy stories, when you achieve that ambition, you find out you don't want it.
Jarvis Cocker
#19. I'm an interpreter of stories. When I perform it's like sitting down at my piano and telling fairy stories.
Nat King Cole
#20. I've always been a huge fantasy fan. I was always interested in fairy tales and anything with magic or dragons ... I was always drawn to those types of stories.
Sarah J. Maas
#21. I love the stories of changelings and the thought that the Fey were these ancient, capricious creatures who were tricky and dangerous. I've always preferred the Brothers Grimm faery tales to the Disney fairy tales.
Julie Kagawa
#22. but the stories on the edge of civilization are horrible things. They're as cruel and violent as the nastiest fairy tales, but they don't have any hope or happily-ever-afters. They have victims, not heroes. The best you get is to escape and go home.
Richard Roberts
#23. She's as old as the hills, evil as a snake, all malevolence and magic and death.
Neil Gaiman
#24. One evening, after a particularly terrible row, the prince smashed his princess over the head with an old wooden clock and she tumbled to the floor, dead.
Brooke Warra
#25. The children will need new stories and fairy tales to see them through their nightmares and daydreams, to transfigure their sorrows and fears at not being able to remain children forever.
Keith Donohue
#26. Many fairy tales and ballads present us with animals who are nobler, truer, and kinder than the greedy human beings who desire to possess them. I guess I tend to read these stories as very early (and possibly unconscious) feminist texts.
Delia Sherman
#27. When we think about fairy tales, we think about happily ever afters, forgetting the darkness that stories beginning with "once upon a time" so often contain.
I tried to protect Shay from that darkness. But there was no way to shield her from the truth: Life is not a fairy tale.
Laura J. Burns
#29. We all recall the cruel stepmother in fairy tales. That archetype is often a necessary element in a fairy tale so that the heroine/hero can become a person of character and power. Stories of heroes and heroines often begin with a wound or loss or injustice and end with heroic acts of restoration.
David Richo
#30. Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people's lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.
Diana Wynne Jones
#31. Marry Gentry Swallowing Darkness (Laurell K. Hamilton):Pick any fairy tale that's based on older stories, and the heroine of the piece has a miserable, dangerous, nightmarish time of it.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#32. In stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they always say the heroine is 'as good as she is beautiful.' I wondered if people just wanted that to be true, wanted the beautiful to be good. I wondered if they wanted the ugly to be bad because then they wouldn't have to feel bad for them.
Alex Flinn
#33. Of course you don't believe in fairies. You're fifteen. You think I believed in fairies at fifteen? Took me until I was at least a hundred and forty. Hundred and fifty, maybe. Anyway, he wasn't a fairy. He was a librarian. All right?
Neil Gaiman
#34. Fairy tales are just true stories that humans have chosen not to believe in any more. Besides, this is Myths and Legends where dreams and nightmares come to life.
Stacie Simpson
#35. I believe that our lives, just like fairy tales - the stories that have been written by us humans, through our own experiences of living - will always have a Hero and a Heroine, a Fairy Godmother and a Wicked Witch.
Lucinda Riley
#36. The television dramas we grew up on, stories of star-crossed lovers, stories of love overcoming all obstacles, well, they're all fairy tales, obviously, like the television news; but the obvious is only obvious when it happens to someone else.
Anthony Marra
#37. Nothing is sadder than a child burdened by reality, after all. Those stories were our family fairy tales.
Veronica Montes
#38. When my mom was alive, she read me stories every night. "Use your imagination, Lorelei," she'd say, "and your whole life can be a fairy tale." I wanted that to be true. But I should have paid more attention to the fairy tales.
Nikki Loftin
#39. If you read fairy tales carefully, you'll notice they are mostly about people who aren't heroes. They don't have special powers, or gifts. Often they are despised as stupid, They are bullied, beaten up, robbed, starved. But they find they are stronger than their misfortunes.
Amanda Craig
#40. My inspiration is my life, what I see happening around me. It can be history and, quite often, plain traditional fairy tales. But I never adapt; I nourish myself with old stories, and then create my own tales.
Michel Ocelot
#41. They weren't true stories; they were better than that.
Alice Hoffman
#42. Fairy tales are such evil little stories for young children.
Cecelia Ahern
#43. My dream was to eventually make movies. To be part of the fairy tales, stories and novels I loved reading so much growing up.
Irena A. Hoffman
#44. Everyone knew you shouldn't go biting into fruit offered to you by magical creatures in the woods, even if you'd thought until just five minutes ago that such stories were, you know, only stories.
Molly Ringle
#45. You don't need princes to save you. I don't have a lot of patience for stories in which women are rescued by men.
Neil Gaiman
#46. Surely she knows
like I do
that fairy tales are just stories. That happy endings aren't real.
Jodi Picoult
#47. Every kid loves fairy tales, stories of witches and giants and magicians. Then, when you get a little older you can't read fairy tales anymore.
Stan Lee
#48. Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
Willa Cather
#50. Atheism is a fairy story for people afraid of the Light
John Lennox
#51. Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust. This is the most marvelous kind of trouble to get in.
Erin Morgenstern
#52. Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.
C.S. Lewis
#54. It's fun to twist fairy tales, but at the same time, I know I need to write stories that are different enough from each other that fans don't feel like they're just reading the same story over and over again.
Janette Rallison
#55. Remember that stories are more than just words, more than fairy tales. They are magic.
Valya Dudycz Lupescu
#56. Everyone wants the fairy tale, but don't forget there are dragons in those stories.
R. Queen
#57. I cannot imagine a life without books.
Without Father's stories of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses, without pirate stories and fairy tales and poems. Without the hope of another way, of freedom and adventure beyond what we have here and now. How dark life would be.
Jessica Spotswood
#58. Fairy tales read before bed tend to make me dream. They're all quite violent stories, as are my dreams.
Glen Duncan
#59. In the stories, the old fairy tales, a hero comes. But all my heroes are gone or dead. No one is coming for me.
Victoria Aveyard
#60. There are no fairy tales in the wild, no Cinderella stories. The lowly wolf that seems to rise to the top of the pack was really the alpha all along
Jodi Picoult
#61. Fairy tales represent hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.
Kate Bernheimer
#62. The world of religion isn't a logical world; that's why children like it. It's a world of worked-out fantasies, very similar to children's stories or fairy tales.
Yehuda Amichai
#63. As for fairy tales, he understood that they were reflections of the people who had spun them, and were flecked with little truths - intrusions of reality into fantasy, like toast crumbs on a wizard's beard.
Laini Taylor
#64. Children delight in folk-tale and fairy lore, but the very little child loves best the story which mirrors the familiar. And it is for him, and for the mother who is striving in this age of profusion to guard the innate simplicity of her child's nature, that I have written my little stories.
Maud Lindsay
#65. I don't know these stories as well as they know me, I've discovered.
Joan Gould
#66. Everything that ever happened is just stories now, Earl. But it was all very real to people while it was happening. Wasn't it?
Terry Moore
#67. The fact that fairy tales remain a literary underdog-undervalued and undermined-even as they shape so many popular stories, redoubles my certainty that it is time for contemporary fairy tales to be celebrated in a popular, literary collection. Fairy tales hold the secret to reading.
Kate Bernheimer
#68. She is a figure of legend and fairy tale, one to be taken seriously, or she might knock you off your feet with a quick whirl of the staff she carries everywhere.
Claire Wong
#69. [Angels] aid us in our personal mission. We have to learn to listen, for if we block the angels out, they become only the fairy beings of dreams and pleasant stories.
Silver RavenWolf
#70. We're all just big kids. That's all we are. We are artistes. We grew up wanting to be part of the fantasy of the fairy tales and the stories.
Angelina Jolie
#71. The unsparing savagery of stories like the Robber Bridegroom is a sharp reminder that fairy tales belong to the childhood of culture as much as the culture of childhood ... they capture anxieties and fantasies that have deep roots in childhood experience
Maria Tatar
#72. Fairy tales are much more than silly bedtime stories," the teacher continued. "The solution to almost every problem imaginable can be found in the outcome of a fairy tale. Fairy tales are life lessons disguised with colorful characters and situations. "'The
Chris Colfer
#73. You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
C.S. Lewis
#74. Did this mean every impossible fairy tale was grounded somewhere in absolute truth? Was there anything sane or normal at all, or was everything just magic and ghost stories?
Stephenie Meyer
#75. And fairy tales are make-believe. They are the stories we tell to small children to make them believe the world is a far better place than it really is.
J.L. Vallance
#76. It's just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he'd forget my water or food and I'd cry and cry and cry." She stops talking and looks out the window. "I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts of books. But they got used up.
Holly Black
#77. Story of O is a fairy tale for another world, a world where some part of me lived for a long time, a world that no longer exists except between the covers of a book.
Anne Desclos
#78. Mother didn't understand that children aren't frightened by stories; that their lives are full of far more frightening things than those contained in fairy tales.
Kate Morton
#79. Stories were migrants, blow-ins, border-crossers, tunnellers from France and Italy and more distant territories where earlier and similar stories had been passed on in Arabic and Persian and Chinese and Sanskrit.
Marina Warner
#80. I like stories where women save themselves.
Neil Gaiman
#81. What do you get when you cross an egomaniacal fairy godmother, an arrogant genie, and a couple of wandering plagiarists whose idea of cultural preservation is stealing the stories of unsuspecting villagers and passing them off as their own?
Kate SeRine
#82. Fairy tales are stories of triumph and transformation and true love, all things I fervently believe in.
Kate Forsyth
#83. They sat close to each other, and he told her a story about her eyes. They were beautiful dark lakes in which her thoughts swam about like mermaids. And her forehead was a snowy mountain, grand and shining. These were lovely stories.
Hans Christian Andersen
#84. Nobody said it had to be a story with an ending all neatly tied up like some ridiculous fairy tale. This story's true, and true stories don't have endings, because things just keep going.
Kate Milford
#85. historically fairy tales were women's stories, passed orally in a time when women didn't have many rights.
Nora Roberts
#86. Fairy tales to me are never happy, sweet stories. They're moral stories about overcoming the dark side and the bad.
Joe Wright
#87. She moves like beauty, she whispers to us of wind and forest - and she tells us stories, such stories that we wake in the night, dreaming dreams of a life long past. she reminds us of what we used to be.
She reminds us of what we could be.
Meagan Spooner
#88. But as she continued and finished her tale, I could tell that her heart was elsewhere, and when she excused herself to go to bed, she left without saying good night. After that, the princesses in her stories were always beautiful. Always.
Kelly Barnhill
#89. I think you're a fairy tale. I think you're magical, and brave, and exquisite. And I hope you'll let me be in your story.
Laini Taylor
#90. Love in the real world doesn't usually work out the way stories make us think it should. We don't always get fairy-tale endings. People split up and move on. Just because you love someone doesn't mean you can't love someone else. - Georgina to Brandy
Richelle Mead
#91. Most happy stories are fantasies that never happened. A form of wish fulfillment. ( ... ) Telling happy stories that actually happened lends a sort of fairy-tale quality to real life. They remind the teller and the listener of the magic that can be found in the mundane if you pay close attention.
Megan McCafferty
#92. A child's best friend is often the one telling bedtime stories.
Eraldo Banovac
#93. Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you're at the end of the book, and it's only the end of a chapter.
Deb Caletti
#94. I was telling stories before I could write. I like to tell stories, and I like to talk to things. If you]ve read fairy tales, you know that everything can talk,from trees to chairs to tables to brooms. So I grew up thinking that, and I turned it into stories.
J. California Cooper
#95. I'm fascinated with the stories that we tell. Real histories become fantasies and fairy tales, morality tales and fables. There's something interesting and funny and perverse about the way fairytale sometimes passes for history, for truth.
Kara Walker
#96. Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren't lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth - because the story of Grandpa Portman's childhood wasn't a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.
Ransom Riggs
#97. I wanted the chance to look again at very famous stories and see what made them work well, whether there were any ways in which they could be improved. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.
Philip Pullman
#98. Fiction was the only way I stayed sane. But I didn't read romances or fairy tales. Nope. I looked for the gritty, the perverse. The dark. Because those kinds of stories gave me hope that there were far worse things in life than what I was dealing with.
Stevie J. Cole
#99. I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
Amy Tan
#100. I'm not a big fan of kids' movies that have this knowing snarkiness to them or this post-modern take on storytelling. I think that sails right over the heads of most kids. There's something to be said for a well-told fairy tale. There's a reason that these mythic stories stay with us.
John C. Reilly
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